Attack of the Ghouls
Since sometime this morning, my website has been under attack by people searching for p1ctur3s 0f k0b3 bry@nt’s all3g3d v1ct1m. The reason for this is that Google, Yahoo, and AOL have all picked up my site as the #3-#6 result on a search for a phrase like the one I l33ted up above.
The word “p1ctur3” (well, its properly spelled variant) was in the leader of one of my Montreal articles. The rest of the words are in the article before this one. But the search engines can’t tell the difference — and so a relatively innocent blog like mine is getting mixed up in one of the more disturbing sides of the Kobe story. Personally, I’d just like the ghouls to go away. The idea of searching for pictures of a v1ct1m of s3xual a55ault is very wrong.
On a larger scale, the issue of blogs getting absurdly high placement in search engine results is a major issue for search engine providers. It was actually rumored a few months ago that Google would remove blogs from its main index for just this reason. The root problem appears to be that blogs perform the Web’s original purpose too well. Bloggers link to anything and everything; thus, blogs tend to accumulate serious authority points on search engines that place value on outbound links. When inbound links are also considered, the incestuous nature of the blogger community further complicates things — more than anything, bloggers love to link each other’s sites. So the authority points build even further. Blogs also change quickly, and as such get indexed more often.
The net effect is that the appearance of a certain set of words on a blog appears to be ranked higher than that same set of words on a site that doesn’t interlink as well with the rest of the Web — whether or not the content on the blog actually applies to the search. Sometimes that’s fun, when you see completely random (but innocuous) search terms in your referrer logs. But sometimes it isn’t — like today.
UPDATE 23 July 2003, 1300 EDT: Kobe visitor jailing is now in effect. After some lunchtime PHP-monkeying, the front page is now tweaked so visitors searching on Kobe-related terms are banished to the Kobe-jail page and banned from BTN for two weeks. Initial success rate appears to be upwards of 90% (and I don’t want to hear about the failures, so ghouls, don’t bother commenting). By the way, don’t click on the jail-page link unless you have your speakers muted or headphones plugged in.
UPDATE 23 July 2003, 1839 EDT: First piece of hate mail. Sounds like somebody got embarrassed looking for something he shouldn’t have been. Excuse me for not being terribly sympathetic as I delete the e-mail. And didn’t I mention that I don’t want to hear about you getting around it? A more effective ban would have taken more time to build than I wanted to waste on you scum.
22 July 2003 / 5 Comments / Tags: tech